“If love is the answer, community is the context. Tenderness is the methodology— tenderness is the way.” Father Gregory Boyle

22 May 2015

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Memorare, Momento Mori

“The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.”

Jean Lorrain, Le Crime Des Riches: Suivi de Paris Forain, 1905

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

The US will have a three day weekend for Memorial Day on Monday, in which we remember those who died in service to the people of this country.

Stocks were frisky after the core CPI printed a little hotter than expected at .3% for the month. No one apparently noticed that wages had zero growth.

The notion that inflation, not driven by wages or presumably demand, is a good thing smacks of cargo cult economics. Oh look, we have inflation, so we must have growth.

Or, this could be what happens when the Fed vigorously expands its balance sheet in a top down stimulus policy error that inflates assets while driving the velocity of that money to record lows because of the lack of organic growth from the bottom up in wages and broad demand.

I have a small index short working since yesterday. There could be a few more attempts at breaking overhead resistance, but the risks look mispriced a bit here. Let's see if it works or not because as the wiseguys like to point out, in the short term these markets don't listen to anything except their own self-serving baloney. Kind of like our politicians.

Le Propriétaire

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Need Little - Want Less - Love More

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"A credibility trap is when the managerial functions of a society have been sufficiently compromised by corruption so that the leadership cannot reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without implicating a broad swath of the powerful, including themselves.

The moneyed interests and their aspirants tolerate the corruption because they have profited from it, and would like to continue to do so. Discipline is maintained by various forms of soft financial rewards and career and social coercion."

These are personal observations about the economy and the markets. In providing information, I hope this allows you to make your own decisions in an informed manner, even if it is from learning by my mistakes, which are many. As a standing policy I never provide individual investment advice to anyone. I will only occasionally disclose my personal positions for purposes of illustration. Understand that my own circumstances could differ greatly from your own, and therefore what is suitable for me may not be suitable for you. My comments are intended to be reflection on general macro financial and economic events and trends.